Windows Enterprise Desktop

In my last blog, I bashed the Soluto Windows boot optimization tool: “Just Another Blue Screen Monday Morning.” I’m writing about it again because I do think the program has real value — it’s just not yet ready for prime-time or production use. To the vendor’s credit, the company does clearly mark it as a beta, and it is astoundingly reponsive to user input and complaints (each of my reports got a personal, not “personalized,” email response in under 12 hours). And FWIW, the company also seems interested in and ready to react to user bug and problem reports.

Here are the results from my recent encounter with the tool on all 7 working machines currently in my home office (or at my disposal):

Don’t know if it was my complex set-up, my SSD, or what, but my machine turned up a BSOD on first post-install reboot

A900Test

Win7 Pro x64

Boot analysis never completes

None

DIY computer with P53 Pro mobo, Intel Q9450 CPU, 8 GB RAM

Dragon

Win7 Pro x64

Success

00:11

HP HDX9200 notebook with T9500 CPU, 8 GB RAM (original time 02:28)

D620Laptop

Win7 Pro x86

Success

00:26

Dell Latitude D620 with T7200 CPU, 4 GB RAM (original time: 1:35)

Dina-PC

Win7 Pro x86

Boot analysis never completes

None

DIY mini-ITX with MSI mobo, T2300 CPU, 4 GB RAM

HPi7Laptop

Win7 Pro x64

BSOD

None

HP dv6 notebook PC with i7 720M CPU, 6 GB RAM

Hopefully, this more extended report helps to put some teeth into my earlier contention that Soluto, while interesting, is not yet ready for production use. Success on 3 out of 7 machines is a rate of under 50% (42.85% to be more exact): by itself, that tells me the software has a way to go before it will appeal to the great unwashed on the one hand (that is, normal home PC users) or to IT professionals on the other hand.

The boot-time savings were lowest on my least powerful machine (my Asus Eee PC 1000HE netbook, with its Atom N280 and 2 GB RAM), and somewhat less than thrilling on my high-end HP HDX9200 notebook (11 seconds off an original boot time of 2:28 is a 7.4% improvement: nice but not earth-shaking). My rock-solid, fabulous Dell D620 notebook accrued the largest gain with 25 seconds off 1:35 (26.3% is a pretty substantial improvement, in my book).

The D620 Notebook got the best boot boost from Soluto

Soluto is definitely worth keeping an eye on, and even, keeping one’s fingers crossed that the program emerges from beta into truly commercial status. If and when that happens it’s going into my standard Windows toolkit for sure. Right now, the program is like the famous ditty about the girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead: “When she was good, she was very, very good; But when she was bad, she was horrid.”

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The Windows Enterprise Desktop blog features topics of interest to IT professionals who work with Windows on large networks. Topics are Windows OS setup and configuration, release definition, deployment, migration, virtualization, terminal services, and security.